Genesis 39 "Tenacious Providence" Scott Hoezee

Frederick Buechner once whimsically defined theology by way of an analogy. Theology is the study of God and his ways. But for all we know perhaps beetles study humanity and its ways and call their observations "humanology." If so, we would probably be more touched than irritated by this beetle-size attempt to grasp us. One hopes, Buechner concludes, that God feels the same way about our attempts to grasp him!

Indeed, in the grand scheme of things, our attempts to understand the greatness and grandeur of God are puny compared to the subject matter at hand. We would never even be able to make a start in knowing God were it not for the fact that God himself took the initiative to reveal himself to us. Still, taking what we know, we do our best to say meaningful (and we hope mostly true) things about the One who is properly our Alpha and Omega, our beginning and our end, and our everything in between, too.

Within the larger scope of this theological enterprise, perhaps no area of study is quite as difficult as matters related to providence. And indeed, the providence of God has been generating a lot of heat in evangelical circles the past ten years or so. For the most part evangelicals have tended to hew quite closely to some version of John Calvin's thinking on the sovereignty of God and the exercise of divine providence. Calvin had a huge doctrine of God's sovereignty, very nearly insisting that everything that happens in the universe (including just possibly even bad things) must ultimately be traced back to the divine will.

Elements of Calvin's thought persist even among those who would otherwise claim their theology has nothing to do with John Calvin. But echoes of Calvin can be heard every time someone says, "God has a plan for your life." These big thoughts on providence can be detected whenever someone responds to a tragic death by saying something like, "I'm sure God had a reason for taking her life" or "God must have needed that little one in heaven more than we did here on earth."

But not everyone is comfortable with the notion that everything, even the ugly, stems directly from God's plan. So some evangelical thinkers have recently begun developing a theology called "free-will theism" or "the openness of God." I won't go into all the details of this except to say that this new theology tries to steer a middle course between staunch Calvinist-types who say that God controls just about everything and the other extreme of process theology that sometimes comes close to saying that God controls very little.

Process theology claims that God travels with us through time. God does not really know the future because although God knows everything that is real, the future does not yet exist, and so even God can't know it. Instead God is a fellow traveler, knowing everything that happens as it happens but not really controlling all events. God weeps when we weep, rejoices when we rejoice, and is ever and always available to us no matter what. God's love is constant, his compassion is forever, but God is not simply executing some pre-determined plan, as though the entire cosmic story--including every last jot and tittle of your life and my life--were some pre-written script that both God and we can do no more than follow.

Whether or not you agree with that, it's not difficult to see where such retro-fitted notions of providence come from: these thoughts emerge from the tragedies of life. It is in many ways the classic "problem of evil" wherein we must reconcile a God who is utterly in charge of the universe with a universe that contains any number of sad, bad, and evil things--things we do not want to associate too snugly with God.

Because as we noted a few weeks ago when we looked at the beginning of the Joseph stories, although the Bible everywhere teaches the over-arching power of God to act in history, the fact of that divine providence does not mean that the lives of God's people will always be easy. It also does not necessarily mean that all of our hardest questions will be answered. Life's harder knocks and deeper tragedies are the fires in which our ideas of providence get forged. Maybe that is why in the end Calvinism, process theology, and free-will theism all end up admitting the same thing: there is much we simply don't understand. There are many hard questions to which the best answer we can muster is, "We don't know!"

Genesis 39 is a good example. This chapter is bracketed by the providence of God. Sentences like "Yahweh was with Joseph" are like a picture frame that surrounds all of this story's edges. And for the most part, this providence, as you might well expect, leads to good things. Verses 2, 3, 5, 21, and 23 all tell us the same thing: Yahweh is with Joseph. And because of this divine presence in Joseph's life, all manner of good things happen. Joseph keeps getting promoted, keeps getting put in charge of things. What's more, once Joseph is put in charge, things go swimmingly for the people who hired Joseph.

But the same chapter that contains such huge fields of providential flowers in full bloom forces us to wonder about something else: if God is the one who can be credited with doing so much good in Joseph's life, why can't that same God prevent the very wicked thing that stands at this story's center? How can God be so busy prospering Joseph, helping to promote Joseph, and all the rest and yet simultaneously allow Joseph to go to prison because of a false accusation? While he was doing everything else, how difficult would it have been for God to keep Potiphar's wife well away from Joseph? How can it be true both that Yahweh is so intimately with Joseph and that Joseph ends up going to prison?! Indeed, Joseph ends up in prison as a result of his own virtue!

Some scholars have noted that among other things, the tawdry story about Judah and Tamar in Genesis 38 provides a kind of moral foil to Genesis 39. On the one hand you have Judah who so casually goes to bed with a woman he believes to be a prostitute. On the other hand you have Joseph who so steadfastly steers clear of what he knows to be an illicit affair. Joseph seems to be everything his brothers are not. They are the ones who sold him into slavery, though even so God remained with Joseph.

Maybe that is why Joseph lands on his feet in Egypt. He ends up being sold to a man not far removed from the Pharaoh himself. Because of God's work in Joseph's head, heart, and life, Joseph seems at once eminently trustworthy and exceedingly bright. Success follows on success until finally Joseph is made the supervisor for Potiphar's entire household, farm, and staff. Potiphar meanwhile counts himself lucky, sleeps well every single night, and goes off to work knowing that when he gets back home each evening, he will probably have more money in the bank than when he went off to work that morning. What's more, Joseph always has Potiphar's favorite cocktail waiting for him and also has already instructed the chef to prepare a marvelous dinner.

Potiphar is feeling good about most everything. Ah, but his wife is a different matter. She didn't have nearly enough to occupy her time day in and day out, and so she had taken to watching Joseph when, with his shirt off, he cleaned out the pool. Joseph would be sitting at his desk balancing the master's checkbook when suddenly he'd feel a pair of eyes fixed on him. He'd turn around only to see Mrs. Potiphar ducking around the corner. And although he couldn't be certain, there were times when, while toweling off after a bath, he could nearly swear he saw someone passing by the bathroom window.

Finally the day arrived when Mrs. P. dispensed with subtlety. As Joseph entered the house through the back door following his daily check of the farmhands, there she stood: eyes painted, her mouth a glistening ruby red from a healthy application of lipstick, and her body just barely covered by a gossamer fabric draped seductively around her form. "What do you say, handsome?" she asked. In reply, Joseph gave her far more than she bargained for. He does not proffer some simple refusal but instead delivers what amounts to a quite nicely argued moral defense as to why his giving in to her would constitute a multi-pronged sin. Joseph, in addition to having a nicely sculpted body, has a good head on his shoulders and is a highly thoughtful young man. He doesn't carry with him just some vague sense as to why this might be a bad idea but is articulate in targeting why this must not be.

But Joseph may just as well have told the sun to stop shining because Mrs. P. kept after him. Verse 10 hints that beyond the more obvious attempts at seduction, sometimes this woman was more subtle. "OK, OK, Joseph, you don't have to sleep with me. I respect your integrity. I really do. In fact, I could learn some things from a man like you. So what do you say we go on a picnic tomorrow, just you and me. I'll pack some tuna sandwiches, you grab some Chardonnay, and we'll have a good heart to heart about . . . oh, I don't know. Maybe you can teach me about this Yahweh God you serve. Whaddya say?"

But Joseph refuses. Verse 10 concludes by saying that not only did he resist the more obvious enticements but he refused "even to be with her." There would be no picnics, no walks through the countryside, no quiet glass of wine on the back veranda to watch the sun set over the Nile. Joseph was too clever to be taken in by such ploys. But Mrs. Potiphar was not exactly clueless herself. One day, while Joseph was out of the house for about an hour or so on some errand for the master, the mistress of the house managed to get rid of every single one of the other servants, too. The maid was sent to town to buy some new sheets, the chef was dispatched to the farmer's market to find that rare vegetable Mrs. P. told him she simply had to have at dinner that evening, and so forth.

When Joseph got home, things were oddly quiet in the house. There was no one there, except Mrs. Potiphar. She was nearly naked this time, rushing at him from her bedroom, grabbing him by his tunic, and demanding he sleep with her right then and there. This time there are no ethical speeches by Joseph. Instead he flees the house so fast, he ends up slipping right out of his clothes. Maybe he felt more tempted this time than the other times, maybe her intensity simply scared him. But this time he can't afford trying to reason his way out of the situation. So he runs off.

For the second time in Genesis Joseph is left without his clothes. First it was his brothers stripping him of his coat of many colors and dipping it in goat blood to fake Joseph's death. Now it's Mrs. P. who has stripped him and the result of this stripping ends up being not unlike what happened the first time: Joseph ends up as good as dead. With a shrieking cry of "Rape!" Potiphar's wife accuses "that Hebrew" of taking advantage of her while all the other servants were away. When Potiphar himself got home that evening, his wife met him at the door, Joseph's clothes still bunched up in her sweaty hands. And before you could say "Tutankahman," Joseph was thrown into the slammer.

Once again the author of Genesis sows a seed of hope by noting in verse 20 that the particular prison Joseph was in was the same one where "the king's prisoners were confined." It is that tiny little fact that will spell Joseph's future, as the next chapter will make clear. Even before then, however, Joseph seems to rise to the top of the prison heap about as quickly, and for the same providential reason, as he had gotten so quickly promoted in Potiphar's household. Soon he's a prison trustee and then the warden's right-hand man.

From the outside looking in, the casual observer could have witnessed Joseph's rise first on Potiphar's staff and then in prison and could then perhaps say something like, "That guy was born with a silver spoon in his mouth! That guy is a like an Egyptian cat: no matter what great height you drop him from, he lands on his feet! He's Mr. Lucky!" But we're not casual observers looking in from the outside but biblical insiders and so we know that the secret of Joseph's success is not mere good fortune, not pluck, not brains, and not because Joseph had been born under some lucky star. It is because the Lord is with him. It is because Yahweh is watching out for him.

But just this fact brings us back to that bevy of questions I asked earlier. Why is it that even in the lives of the providentially blessed bad things still happen? It's wonderful that once Joseph gets to prison he continues to do well, but why does he need to be there at all? It's wonderful, ultimately, that Joseph will get a new job with the Pharaoh precisely because of the contacts he forges in prison, but surely any God who is as great as Yahweh could have accomplished Joseph's rise without this most dreadful bump of jail time.

As most all of us know, in retrospect and only many years later, Joseph will connect the dots and see the good things God brought out of every calamity that ever befell him, including even the raw evil of his being sold as a slave and the rotten thing Mrs. Potiphar did to him. So is all of this part of some bigger divine plan that had been carefully sketched out on a providential drawing board by God himself? Does God motivate ten brothers to hate a younger brother enough to sell him? Does God crank up the hormones on a Mrs. Potiphar and then, furthermore, entice her to lie?

Or do we veer at this point a bit closer to the free-will theism, openness of God folks and so say that God, while never undone by the things that happen, does not plan every one of them, either. God grants people enough free will that many times things take place that are most certainly not God's will or plan. But then, as I hinted earlier this evening, it doesn't matter which theological direction you go, you will still end up having a good and loving God on the one side, bad and evil events on the other side, and the connection between the two will remain a mystery. Few of us are completely comfortable with either the notion that God plans evil or with the notion that evil takes place completely against God's wishes.

Genesis 39 does not answer such questions or solve such quandaries for us. I don't think it even tries. What it shows instead is that God is with his people, God sticks with his people, and even some of the worst things that can come our way do not and cannot derail God. If Mrs. Potiphar thought she'd seen the last of this man, then she will be in for the same surprise one day as Joseph's brothers. People keep tossing Joseph aside like a dirty sock, but the God who gave Joseph's those dreams of greatness so long ago keeps catching Joseph in his divine arms whenever someone hurls him off to the side again

We may or may not be able to tie off all the loose ends of questions relating to providence, God, and evil. But there is something comforting about the divine tenacity we see in Genesis. God is nothing if not determined to realize his every good plan and intention for this creation. In that tenacious providence is our every hope, even in those times when, like Joseph, we feel bewildered at how badly things sometimes go. And like some theologians say, maybe it is indeed true that God feels bad about it all, too, that God wishes it were not so just as much as we wish that. Some things that happen cannot possibly have been a good and loving God's idea. But precisely because God is good, is loving, and is also so very powerful, he will never let this life's tragedies have the last word. Because for us, as for Joseph in Genesis 39, the last thing to say is the same as the first thing to say: "the Lord is with us." Thanks be to God! Amen.